Streetwear’s Nigo is making ‘real-to-wear’ for LVMH’s Kenzo

Last September, the Japanese designer Nigo became the creative director of the Paris-based, LVMH-owned label Kenzo. It was a notable appointment, beyond just a shift of creative direction: Nigo is the first Japanese designer to lead the company since its late founder Kenzo Takada retired in 1999. He also comes from the universe of streetwear — an important category totalling $185bn by sales and comprising around 10 per cent of the entire global apparel and footwear market according to a 2019 study by PwC’s Strategy& consultancy.

Thanks to his brand A Bathing Ape (generally known by the acronym BAPE), established in 1993, Nigo is one of streetwear’s founding fathers. BAPE clothes are loud and colourful — a multi-hued camouflage print is a signature. As the label was self-funded at the start, Nigo could only afford to produce limited runs, fuelling the sense of timeliness and scarcity that is integral to streetwear and has influenced fashion marketing across the board.

Eleven days before his sophomore Kenzo show this Sunday, the 51-year-old Nigo, born Tomoaki Nagao, speaks over Zoom from Kenzo’s headquarters in Paris. Situated on rue Vivienne, they are a short leap from a glassed-in shopping gallery where Takada opened his first boutique in 1970. The young label was named “Jungle Jap” at that point — changed to Kenzo in 1976, as Jap was considered a pejorative term in the all-important American market. Today, the company is estimated to turn over some €300mn to €400mn annually, according to trade publication WWD.

Nigo is wearing a white sweatshirt with “Kenzo” scribbled over the heart. Behind him hangs a selection of quilted bomber jackets and shearling-lined denims — streetwear-influenced styles that already mark his revamp of Kenzo, pivoting away from the high-fashion stance taken by predecessor Felipe Oliveira Baptista, who left after just two years. By contrast, Nigo seems to want to take Kenzo back to the street. “The concept is real-to-wear,” Nigo states, through a translator. “As in, the clothes I am going to present on the runway I want to be genuinely wearable.”

His debut autumn/winter 2022 Kenzo show in January took place in the Galerie Vivienne, where models strode the shopping arcade’s mosaic floors in archival-influenced Kenzo pieces. There were poppy prints, denims, easy checked tailoring — plenty of which has already been proposed as rapidly delivered streetwear-influenced “drops”, trickling into the brand’s 95 stores worldwide over the spring. “Everything’s moving more quickly in terms of output, of content, or what people are receiving. The memory span is getting shorter and shorter,” Nigo says. “If somebody sees something that they want and can’t buy it within the same week, then it’s quite difficult for them to go back to that feeling of wanting it.”

The Kenzo shake-up — which included the appointment of a new CEO, Sylvain Blanc — feels fast and furious. But Nigo’s ideas are in fact deeply rooted in the label’s past via the prints and tailoring and also the ethos. Born in 1970 in Maebashi, not far from Tokyo, his first interaction with Kenzo was as a teenager in the mid-1980s. “In context, that’s right in the middle of the DC boom — designer and character brands,” he says. Also known as “DC burando”, this was a fascination with high avant-garde style made by labels such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons, the wave of Japanese designers who followed Kenzo to show in Paris.

“[Kenzo Takada] kind of made a path for everybody,” says Nigo. But Takada’s clothes weren’t avant-garde — rather they were fun, playful, wearable, as were his fashion shows. “He was the first person to really introduce music to fashion shows, for example, and a fashion show being quite a spectacle and the highlight of fashion week. These things have become staple parts of what we accept is the world of fashion now, but they originate with Kenzo-san.”

I do think it’s very interesting, almost shocking, that people like me, who were perceived to come from this background of streetwear, are able now to be the creative directors of these maisons

Nigo’s own background encompasses music. He not only dresses musicians and works with them (he partnered with Pharrell Williams to launch the brands Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream footwear in 2003), but creates his own — he is a member of Japanese hip-hop group Teriyaki Boyz. And although he exited BAPE in 2013, he is still tied to the legacy of a brand that helped define the landscape of modern streetwear.

Many pulled away from that word — not least the late Virgil Abloh, with whom Nigo collaborated on a series of capsule collections for Louis Vuitton and who famously declared “streetwear is dead”. However, Nigo says, “I do think it’s very interesting, almost shocking, that people like me and Virgil, for example, who were perceived to come from this background of streetwear, are able now to be the creative directors of these maisons.” Matthew M Williams, creative director of Givenchy, is another example.

“I feel that streetwear carries the meaning of not being proper design . . . and that it’s traditionally been quite looked down upon,” says Nigo. “But from my perspective, it’s actually very hard to do it well, and it can easily seem fake or soulless.”

Nigo asserts that he has no distaste for the word streetwear — and indeed that luxury can learn from the way it works. “It’s based on having an understanding of the brand from the perspective of the customer, as in what they want and when they want it,” he says. “A very logical way of doing things in the present.”

It was the success of his Vuitton collaborations that netted Nigo Kenzo. “Off the back of that, I was approached by the group, initially Michael [Burke] from LV, because that’s who I was closest to, to see if I would be interested in doing more,” he says. He was. “Having spent so long working in the same kind of environment, in the world of street culture, I was definitely ready to see a new space.” Yet Kenzo wasn’t a specific destination. “If I had been offered an opportunity for another similarly sized Paris maison, given this feeling . . . I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have said no.”

Yet Nigo has genuine affection for the label, and its founder, whom he respectfully refers to with the Japanese honorific “san” but whom, sadly, he didn’t meet before the latter’s death aged 81 in 2020, from complications linked to Covid-19.

The meeting of Paris and Japan is a major theme for Nigo’s upcoming Spring/Summer 2023 show, unveiled on Sunday. “During that DC boom in the ’80s in Japan, the image of Paris was something that was extremely significant and attractive to people in Japan. It was a very desirable thing,” he says. “Everything about Paris was wearable and chic. And so part of what I’m doing is to try and show the perception of Paris from Japan from that period.” He was struck by Japanese details on the clothes in the Kenzo archives: “Traditional prints or fabrics that come from a totally different part of the world, but used with Japanese details.” He says the new show won’t actually be that different from his debut — his style will be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

More than anything else, what Nigo wants is to get people excited about Kenzo again — as they were in the 1970s with its all-singing, all-dancing runway spectaculars that helped assert the creative importance of designer ready-to-wear over haute couture. “What often happens to brands is that they can age along with their customers,” he says. “What I want to do is take Kenzo right back, like it’s zero years old again.” Nigo is wearing a mask, but it feels like he’s smiling. “I want everybody to be able to buy from Kenzo.” That should make Kenzo’s CEO smile, too.

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